Monday, July 14, 2008

All-Star Diversion

I vaguely understand that Josh Hamilton is pulling a Superman act at the Home Run Derby. That's great. I guess so, anyway. Actually, I can't really be bothered to care. It's basically batting practice with a Chris Berman soundtrack.

Besides, Batman is way better than Superman (anyone suggesting otherwise in the comments would risk being banned if I could figure out how to ban people). To that end, I offer you a handy-dandy guide on how to become Batman:

What have comic books and movies told us about Batman's physical abilities?

There's a quote from Neal Adams, the great Batman illustrator, who said Batman would win place or show in every event in the Olympics. Probably if I were Batman's handler, I'd put him in the decathlon. Although Batman is shown in the comics as being the fastest and the strongest and all these other things, in reality you can't actually be all of that at once. To be Batman properly, what you really need to do is be exceptionally good at many different things. It's when you take all the pieces and put them together that you get the Batman . . .

Do you think Batman would take steroids to heal faster?

No. There is one comic where he did go on steroids. He went a little crazy and he went off them again.

How many of us do you think could become a Batman?

If you found the percentage of billionaires and multiply that by the percentage of people who become Olympic decathletes, you could probably get a close estimate.

14 comments:

According to Forbes, there are 1,125 billionaires in the world. We're really only paying attention to males (since we're looking for Batman), and I don't know exactly how many of the 1,125 are male. Let's say 1,000 of them, for ease of calculations. (I would bet the actual number is a little higher than that.)

I'm not certain of the exact number of (male) decathletes that will compete in this year's Olympics, but it's probably in the neighborhood of 100. We'll be generous and assume that, since athletic talent isn't evenly distributed among the world's nations, there are actually 1,000 people in the world who are, athletically, above the level of the bottom 10% of people that will actually compete in the Olympic decathlon.

Actually, simply multiplying the numbers would be a bit misleading, since the level of overlap between these two groups, even theoretically, is very small, since the vast majority of billionaires are over 40 years of age, and I'm guessing that all Olympic decathletes are under 40.

So you'd need to find the percentage of billionaires that are under 40 and then figure the probability (by dividing by total global under-40 male population) that one of them would also be an Olympic decathlete.

Even ignoring that and doing the calculations as suggested, our approximate calculations are:

.0000003333 (percentage of male global population that are billionaires)

times

.0000003333 (percentage of global population that are capable of being Olympic decathletes)

equals

.00000000000011111111111.

Multiplied by the original 3,000,000,000 (approximate male global population), we get.0003333, or a roughly .03 (1 in 3000) chance that there is somebody alive right now capable of becoming Batman.

And of course, Batman is far superior to Superman, but minus 10 points for quoting Neal Adams and then using a Batman image drawn by David Mazzucchelli. Even though David Mazzucchelli's art on Year One was brilliant.

Maybe I'd cheer for Batman if they went head-to-head b/c I mostly root for the underdog and can appreciate ingenuity and trying to overcome ones limitations, but Superman is without a doubt the better SUPERhero.